Pancakes

The
early seas of Shalimar progressed from a rich "chemical soup"
to a rich biological one. Many kinds of unicellular organisms
lived and reproduced in the upper layers of the warm water. Some
eventually began to stick together in clumps of various shapes.
These clumps tended to be clones of a single cell, perhaps one
that had been detached from another clump. The clumps increase
in size by cell division, and break apart when their size begins
to interfere with the welfare of their individual members.

The
primary need of the cookers, which perform the same role as plants
on earth, is for light, which affects how they can successfully
clump together. We have named one group of linked plant cells
Pancakes, because they form flat, thin plates that float at the
surface of the water. This staying together seems to provide advantages
in that some of the gases that they excrete are on the underside
of the plate, and so provide a little buoyancy to hold the group
close to the surface of the water.

As the pancake gets larger, more gas can be trapped on its underside.
Pancakes are very thin and flat, which allows each individual
cell to have access to the water. Pancakes are also fragile, because
of their thinness. Wave action can break them apart easily. The
earliest ones were probably less than a quarter of an inch across,
and so thin as to be virtually invisible. As they continued to
exist, additional layers of cells were added, forming interior
layers of cells whose function was to support the growth of the
cells above them.
This development reduced the light being received by the cells
on the bottom of the pancake. These lowest cells then began to
grow root-like projections which stabilized the floating group
further and with which they also began to intercept and feed on
organic debris in the water. There are many Pancakes in Shalimar's
oceans today.

Because
the pancakes are floaters, they are able to live anywhere that
the water is warm, without any necessity for adaptation to the
nature of the sea bottom. They are most plentiful in shallow,
sheltered waters, where they are not subject to much wave agitation.
They are not found in the higher latitudes where the oceans may
freeze.

Eventually,
some of the pancakes in the shallow water found their trailing
roots getting buried in the silt. The roots had already been used
to digest organic flotsam that had become tangled in their fibers:
from debris digestion to using the roots to extract nourishment
from soil was a short step. The stability that anchored roots
gave the pancake was advantageous in some areas, and the roots
gradually fused together to form a rooted trunk that divided into
roots at the base. They also grew longer, and probed deeper into
the mud. These pancakes were turning into another group: tables.

Tables
began as rooted pancakes. Once affixed to the sea bottom, they
had to find ways to adapt to the variable depths of the water.
Their
range was restricted so long as they had short stems, and they
could easily get buried under the silt. In some the stems grew
longer, in others roots grew out to the edge of the disk, adding
support and simplifying the transport of materials. Then the roots
extended out beyond the edge of the disk, making a small branch,
and supporting a smaller disk at its tip. Once the adaptation
of linking disks together had been made, the plant could easily
grow taller and could also cover a larger total area with smaller
and less fragile components. Some of these tables appear as a
circle of small disks at the surface: more deeply rooted varieties
have extended their small individual disks to form long ribbons.
As tables have retained the interior gas reservoirs that developed
in the pancakes, their leaves float readily.